Skidmore

Last night we travelled down to Saratoga to play Skidmore College. We beat them 3-2 last year at home after being 2-0 after 20 minutes so we knew that would be on their minds and in their team talk.

We changed our lineup for the game mainly because of health issues concerning Hamilton and Bandov. Hamilton didn’t even travel with the squad and that was a bit of a blow because he is such a hard worker, it is always nice to have someone like him. Joey Jones and Tom Greene came into the lineup and it must have been a big occasion for them making their first collegiate starts. Tommy even had his own fan club in the stands with his high school team attending and making some noise for him.

After the last few games we have talked about the importance of scoring early and often. We are confident that most teams will not be able to score against us because we defend so well but you have to score to be able to win games.

Skidmore had a nice crowd there and they made themselves known with some creative chants and chirps. I think for most of us that sort of thing makes us play better and we started the game with some great passing and moving. We knocked the ball around smoothly and got in behind them. They had to resort to fouling us and we got a lot of free kicks. We are extremely dangerous from set pieces because usually Bart or Lojo get on the end of them but our first goal came from JJ. He was one of the smallest players in the box but he scored a bullet header and was smiling from ear to ear with his first ever goal. It’s always nice to see someone score their first goal because you never forget it. We were talking about it on the way home and we all remember our first goal, how we scored it and who it was against.

After the goal we kind of took our foot off the gas and they pushed forward a little more and they were receiving what we felt were very generous calls from the referee. We saw out the half as even if teams do have possession against us they aren’t generally dangerous because we defend well.

At half time we talked about getting the next goal and how big that would be but it didn’t go the way we wanted. They changed up their formation and they took away our extra midfielder which really changed the face of the game. We did have opportunities to keep the ball but we lacked composure and confidence and needlessly gave it away. In the end we finished the game out and got another win to go into conference play undefeated.

I think this is a big psychological boost to us and the longer we go undefeated the better. SUNYAC’s is a totally different game to the non-conference games and we really need to bring our game every week because everyone’s goal at the start of the season is to win the conference and we are due a title.

We play Brockport on Friday and they are the conference champs so it’s a big game for us, we are aiming to stay undefeated and hopefully that can happen.